Educating Nurses to Help Promote Diabetes Self-Care Management in Primary Care

Diabetes is a chronic disease that has a genetic and lifestyle component, and it affects individuals in various parts of the world. A lack of understanding of the nature of the disease has contributed to the complications experienced by patients with diabetes 2 (DM2), such as an elevated glycosylated hemoglobin (A1C) and hyperglycemia. At the clinic where this project took place, patients received an initial teaching but did not get any further support or resources to manage their disease. A four sections of a 30 minutes each was the educational presentation used with staff at the clinic to help them with the right strategies to teach patients about their disease and how to self-manage. The research question tries to find out if an educational program provided to these primary care staff would ultimately help DM 2 patients. The chronic care model by Wagner and the adult learning theory by Knowles were used to guide this project. Eleven staff members participated in the pre and post-test well as the training. The results of the pre and post-test were compared using the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test and were significant (Z = -3.020, p = .003), representing a positive improvement after the education was given to the staff. The primary care clinic will follow up with a quality assurance in 6 months to check and monitor the A1C level to see if the teaching was effective. An understanding of the teaching strategies to support patients towards self-care management can improve compliance and reduce the complications of the disease. Developing self-care management is the type of positive social change this project aimed to bring into the care of individuals with DM2 who needed basic instructions, support, and resources essential to help them prevent the damaging effects of chronic hyperglycemia